Nova is a new jailbreak tweak for scheduling outgoing SMS and iMessages

One of the things I’ve long wished to be able to do is schedule messages to be sent at a future date. Fast-forward many years later, and this still isn’t a native feature on the iPhone – not even for Apple’s feature-rich iMessage platform.

Message scheduling would be useful for several different scenarios, including but not limited to ensuring your friends and family get a Happy Birthday message from you or wishing those that you care most about happy holiday messages, even when you would have otherwise forgotten to.

While it remains to be seen whether Apple will be planning a feature like this in the future, one thing we can be sure about is that jailbreakers won’t need to wait for such an implementation. That’s because Nova is a newly released jailbreak tweak by titand3v that lets users schedule carefully crafted SMS and iMessages to individual contacts to be delivered at a user-specified date and time.

Depicted in the screenshot example above is the new button that Nova adds to the Messages app post-installation. When you tap on it, you’ll be provided with a workflow akin to what you see in the screenshot examples below:

From left to right: the user selects when the message will be delivered, then types a message that they want to send, then selects a contact to send it to along with a date and time, and lastly saves their scheduled message. Once saved, it appears in the scheduled messages list.

For a more comprehensive look, we’ve attached the developer’s demonstration video below for your viewing pleasure:

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You can see just how easy this is… and it’s just as easy to see why this would be useful, especially if you’re forgetful and wishing someone a Happy Birthday sometimes slips your mind.

Once installed, Nova also adds a dedicated preference pane to the Settings app where users can configure a few options:

Here, you can:

  • Manage your trial or purchase
  • Enable or disable Nova on demand
  • Configure Nova composition settings
  • Configure Nova colorization settings
  • Configure Nova miscellaneous settings
  • Enable notifications for whenever an update to Nova is available
  • And much more…

Of course, we’ll show you what you can do in the aforementioned preference panes below:

Composition

In the Composition preference pane, users can enter their name and their preferred avatar image.

Colors

In the Colors preference pane, users can:

  • Enable or disable custom colorization on demand and choose colors for each of the following items:
    • Background
    • Cell
    • Font
    • Accent
    • Navigation Bar
    • Clock Icon
    • Checkmark Icon
    • Floating Button
    • Floating Icon
    • Your Bubble Font
    • Recipient Bubble
    • Remaining Time Font
    • Separator Line
    • Remaining Background
    • Sent Background
    • Icons
    • Photo Button
    • Tool Bar

Miscellaneous

In the Miscellaneous preference pane, users can:

  • Hide the floating button in the Messages app when scrolling down
  • Choose the floating button alignment:
    • Left
    • Center
    • Right
  • Enable or disable Haptic Feedback
  • Choose the preferred Haptic Feedback strength:
    • Light
    • Medium
    • Heavy

With such as carefully crafted tweak like Nova, you can rest assured that you’ll never forget to wish someone a Happy Birthday or send a different type of important timely message ever again. The tweak does an awesome job of providing what I would consider essential functionality long forgotten by Apple and pairing it with an amazing user experience that can be mildly customized to your preferred aesthetic.

Those interested in giving the Nova tweak a try can download the tweak for free from the Hyperixa repository via their favorite package manager. We should also note that Nova only supports jailbroken iOS 14 devices.

If you’re not already using the Hyperixa rpeository, then you can add it to your package manager of choice via the following URL:

https://hyperixa.github.io/

How would you use a message scheduling tweak like Nova? Be sure to let us know in the comments section below, especially if you have an interesting use case that doesn’t involve Birthdays or holidays. We’d love to hear about it!